Dear Teacher,

We know these kids and parents exist. But the parents who are active on this blog are the ones who value education – and that includes respect for teachers. We have been treated just as poorly as you have. Consider –

1. Teachers were never asked for their input before forcing terc, em and cmp on them.

2. Teachers have been forced to get extensive re-training and years of professional development for…arithmetic!

3. From terc literature – one of the main goals is “to communicate math content to teachers.”

4. From cmp literature – “communicate math to teachers.”

5. More from cmp – “The teachers Guides contain extensive help with mathematics.”

6. From Elizabeth Phillips, one of the developers of cmp – “The curriculum provides help for the students, of course, but, primarily, it is a help for the teacher.”

7. Our own teachers do not even host the math nights.

8. Nancy Schultz describes our MS teachers as “sponges who do everything I tell them to do.”

Our administration has done everything short of dressing our teachers in clown suits. What are parents supposed to think of teachers when the administration makes them out to be incompetent? I hope you, and all teachers here, are insulted and embarassed by how you’ve been treated.

If you want friggin respect, it’s time to do something decent for the kids and parents who do give a damn.

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listen up, people in the town have spoken they voted for the candidates that proposed less parent involvement in the school system end of story. So if you want to be involved in a proactive fashion with education I would suggest home schooling or a private school Ridgewood is obvious not the place for you .

The people who voted for the status quo do not yet see the systemic nature of our education deficits.

They believe what they are told, that Ridgewood has an excellent education system.

Correction, Ridgewood used to have an excellent education system. I know. I went to school here. Now, though, the administration rests on its past traditions. Why? Because they can with impunity.

What keeps Ridgewood on top is its high socio economic status. Parents here are educated enough and wealthy enough to keep their children from failing at public school.

Failure is also limited by public school itself, which has dumb downed its curriculum and standards to such a degree that it doesn’t take any schooling at all to meet it halfway, and very little to meet it near the top.

While the lowering of standards used to be ad hoc, it has now become a booming business. This is known as the Standards based industry, and it is hard of work.

Advocates (read: soldliers) such as Regina Botsford are armed to the teeth with power point presentations always based on standardized tests. Why? Because the faux “high” scores are usually enough to convince most civilian board members that the approach is yielding positive results.

No matter how low you make the standards, advocates of a “standards” based curriculum (TERC, EM, CMP2, etc.) will always be able to point to “high” test scores. That’s easy to do when the “high” test scores are reflecting “lowered standards.”

There is a reason why reform math is called standards based math. Given that the standard is a moving target (always downward), it is virtually impossible for any standards based program to “fail.” Welcome to the invention of the failure proof public school curriculum.

Most of us, it would seem, have been duped by people only slightly clever enough to keep their jobs in a monopoly enterprise.

That’s not that clever because you don’t get fired in a monopoly for bad performance, you just get shifted to another location.

But it’s clever enough and here’s why: They don’t have to fool all or even most of us. They just have to fool board members.

The survival of the adults in the system comes at the expense of the education of the children. The monopoly nature of the enterprise encourages board members to defend even the weakest administrators because it’s set up to be them (those in the system) against all of us.

Remember, Russia never fired anyone either and the potatoes rotted before making it to the shops.